[muffled ribbit noises]

I am a human person and definitely not a stack of amphibians in a trenchcoat scheming to buy pet store crickets with loose change from the sidewalk

[7frogsspeaks]

Hi! This is a sub-blog for @just7frogsinapeoplesuit containing all of the posts where I have actually Said Words About Stuff.

Most posts will probably be about science/nature and psychology because that's what my brain likes, but I do not control which posts I end up having things to say about. Anything could happen.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Why Masks Work Better Than You Think: An Interactive Essay

Even partly-effective masks can stop the spread of COVID-19, so long as enough people wear them.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

This webpage is great, but for a very tangible example of how well masks work I'd like to add:

[creekfiend]

i really dont conceptualize the thing that i do wherein i try to understand people as accurately as possible as "empathy," and i'm trying to figure out how to articulate the finer points of why that is... i think that prioritizing doing this does typically make someone behave and think in ways that come across as more empathetic to others. but i don't think "making a conscious and active effort to center the personhood of everyone you encounter" is itself empathy. in my mind its like ... mathematical almost. the act of refining the model of the other person is very precise and analytical for me. my feelings dont reallly come into it much -- often i get my feelings hurt by seeing instances of people REFUSING to center someones personhood that i can relate to, but i think that is more like part of what motivates me to try to think this way.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

"Empathy" is a very broad and poorly-defined term, but it's generally split into emotional and cognitive components and what you're referring to here is cognitive empathy! The issue is that most people by default assume someone is referring to emotional empathy (being emotionally affected by others' experiences), which is why calling theory of mind stuff "empathy" feels like it gives people the wrong idea.

The "classification" section of the Wikipedia article for empathy does a decent job describing each and how they're used! The potential synonyms it lists for cognitive empathy are: empathic accuracy, social cognition, perspective-taking, theory of mind, and mentalizing.

[strictlyquadrilateral]

and this isn't even getting into harm that's genuinely necessary! i read a book recently that was intended to educate people in healthcare about medical trauma, written by a medical professional who found that there weren't existing resources to help her cope with the aftermath of the extremely traumatic c section that saved her life. the whole tone of the book was "i know you've never thought about this before, but walk with me through this case study" and it's aimed at other medical professionals! it's aimed at the people who are doing this harm, and so many of them think that people aren't allowed to find it harmful just because it's necessary!

[strictlyquadrilateral]

so many trauma resources assume that your trauma is from a specific person or people who treated you in a way that society deems unacceptable. if your trauma doesn't fit that profile then you're left sitting there like. idk i dont think most of this stuff applies to me. where are the resources for people like me.

[strictlyquadrilateral]

if you were ever scared or in pain and were told that you had to grin and bear it because it's necessary for you to do the thing that scares and hurts you, you are allowed to say that that was traumatic. you are allowed to say that you were scared and in pain and that even if this was the least bad option, even if it was lifesaving, it still was not okay. something being necessary does not inherently make it okay.

[the-real-seebs]

i think i still have mild trauma from a dentistry-related thing some years back, and it was completely voluntary and i wanted it, just, the experience was actually really upsetting. like, totally worth it in overall outcomes, just. wow, yeah. i do not want to ever do that again.

i have more than one thing that saved my life and traumatized me.

[finelinesignattwo]

I'm a juvenile diabetic: relatedly, I used to be crippled by CPTSD. it turns out, infants dislike needles, and having your primary caregivers administer them daily can be bad for those relationships. I had no sense of trauma as the etiology of my issues for a while, because I couldn't find any 'abuse' in my history.

I remember talking to a psychologist: guy was like "are you absolutely sure you weren't abused as a child? I am literally a therapist, so you can tell me". when I demurred, he was like "truly? because you really really come across like you were, and I meet a lot of people with that history".

it was only after a parent mentioned that I'd go quiet and waxy during injections (tonic immobility, in retrospect) that I started to consider whether the lifesaving medical care I received had negative psychological effects.

[fittingoutjane]

This is a common gateway to pseudoscience. People experience trauma from receiving, or from seeing a loved one receive, lifesaving medical care and aren't able to find the space to process that it was necessary, the alternative was worse, AND it was really and truly awful. People who are afraid to go back. People who need accommodations to make necessary medical care less stressful and scary, and can't get them.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Childhood medical trauma can also make you much more susceptible to abuse, because if your first experiences with severe pain and distress at the hands of another person were explained as "this is necessary for your wellbeing, your caregivers approve of this and you are not allowed to refuse", guess what happens in your brain when someone actually abuses you

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Demand destruction vs fuel-superceding infrastructure

I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO THIS FRIDAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.

No one is better at keeping hope alive than Rebecca Solnit, the historian and essayist whose Hope in the Dark got me through the first Trump administration and whose A Paradise Built In Hell inspired my novel Walkaway:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/301070/a-paradise-built-in-hell-by-rebecca-solnit/

In her latest, "Truth, Consequences, Climate, and Demand Destruction," Solnit is nothing short of inspirational – not because she downplays the horror and misery of Trump and his war of choice in Iran, but because she tells us what we stand to salvage from the wreckage:

https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/truth-consequences-climate-and-demand-destruction/

Solnit starts by explaining some of the (many, many) things that Trump doesn't understand. Principally, Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.

High prices sometimes create demand destruction: for example, if a transient shortage in eggs pushes prices up, people might discover that they prefer tofu scrambles in the morning, so even when the price of eggs comes back down, they buy two dozen fewer eggs every month, forever.

Beyond high prices, shortages and rationing are far more likely to lead to demand destruction. In the 10 years following the 1970s oil crisis, US cars doubled in fuel efficiency, and the gas-guzzler didn't return until car manufacturers exploited the American "light truck" loophole to fill the streets with deadly SUVs:

https://medium.com/vision-zero-cities-journal/the-chicken-tax-and-other-ways-the-u-s-government-subsidizes-your-ford-f-150-444a5164c627

But to really max out on demand destruction, you need both rationing and a cheap, easily installed substitute, and that's what the Strait of Epstein crisis, along with solar and batteries, offers the world today. Solar is incredibly cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Batteries are also incredibly cheap, and they're getting cheaper too. For decades, fossil fuel apologists have insisted that we'll never stop setting old dead shit on fire because "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow," but thanks to battery deployment in China and California (and more places very soon), the sun shines all night long:

https://ember-energy.org/app/uploads/2026/04/Global-Electricity-Review-2026.pdf?ref=meditationsinanemergency.com

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump's stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin's quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world's energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he's kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico's Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He'll even let them take all of Venezuela's oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they'd need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump's a machine for creating stranded assets at scale. As Solnit writes, that's because Trump has no strategic foresight; strategy being "the ability to plan for things to arise that may counter your agenda, so you can continue to pursue your agenda." Trump's a bully, and he's accustomed to intimidating his adversaries into capitulating. That's why Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."

This is the GOP's whole vibe these days: "how dare you do unto me as I have done unto you?" Solnit points to GOP outrage in response to Democratic gerrymandering in blue states, which Democrats undertook in direct, explicit response to shameless gerrymandering in Texas and other red states. Solnit says that the GOP has "confused having a lot of power with having all the power" and is perennially surprised when their attacks on Iran and Minneapolis evince a reaction from the people in Iran and Minneapolis.

This is the defective reasoning that caused Comrade Trump to hormuz the world into the full Gretacene. Whereas once the case for the energy transition was driven by activists who warned people about the future consequences of inaction, Trump has summoned up a new army of people who are worried about the present consequences of inaction: such as not being able to drive your car, use your gas stove, or fertilize your crops. Trump has summoned up another army of people, who are worried about the politics of oil, the fact that oil leads to wars and can be mobilized as a weapon when it is withheld from your country.

Activists couldn't deliver the energy transition on their own – but now there's a coalition that's driving rapid, irreversible change: activists concerned about the future of the planet, in coalition with economic actors concerned about the consequences of not being able to cook, heat your home, or keep the lights on; in coalition with national security hawks worried about the geopolitics of oil. That's Comrade Trump's three-part mobilization: human rights, finance, and national security, all insisting that the enemy gets a vote, and voting unanimously for a post-American world.

Last week marked the first Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels conference, attended by representatives from 54 countries who sidestepped the US- and China-dominated UN to ratify the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty Initiative, whose 18 signatories include Colombia, a major oil producer.

The world is moving on, and Trump continues to insist that he can roll back history to some imaginary era of a Great America. Every time this fails, he doubles down on his failures and sets the stage for more failure to come. Take Trump's decision to have the US blockade the Strait of Hormuz. Not only is this a powerful force for demand destruction – but, as Trita Parsi writes, it's also poison for Trump's own electoral fortunes in America:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-iran-blockade/

Trump won in 2024 by campaigning to improve Americans' cost of living. This is a powerful campaign strategy, and it's not limited to fascists, as Zohran Mamdani can attest. But for this to work, you actually have to reduce the cost of living once you take office, otherwise you will be hated and rejected and hampered in everything you do. The problem (for Trump – but not for Mamdani!) is that America's high cost of living is driven by corporate profiteering, and the only way to fix it is to make the rich poorer so as to make the poor richer:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/24/mamdani-thought/#public-excellence

If Trump had chosen to bullshit his way through the Iranian blockade of the strait, allowing the Iranians to collect a $2m toll per tanker (payable in Chinese renminbi!), well, oil would have gone up in price some, but the coming runaway inflation on food and fuel would have been substantially blunted. Instead, he decided to "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" by adding a US blockade, which means that prices in the US are going to skyrocket, making his base furious and driving turnout for Democrats, along with support for more renewables, even among blood-red Republican rural Texas ranchers, who have had enough of "DEI for fossil fuels":

https://austinfreepress.org/renewables-are-now-the-costco-of-energy-production-bill-mckibben-says/

The renewables transition is now a self-licking ice-cream cone, a flywheel that only spins faster and faster. As Solnit writes, this is true notwithstanding the concerns by some climate advocates about the materials needed for the transition. Sure, there will be some extraction involved in mass electrification, and if that's done badly, it will involve stealing and destroying more land from poor and indigenous people. But we don't have to do it badly!

Meanwhile, not transitioning to renewables absolutely requires an endless cycle of incredibly destructive and genocidal extraction. Remember, fossil fuels are fuels, while renewables are infrastructure. Fuels need to be dug up and destroyed every year for so long as we insist on setting old dead shit on fire to survive. We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

The infrastructure of renewables – panels, batteries, transmission lines – requires materials that are often scarce and whose processing involves extremely harmful and polluting processes. But those materials are all recyclable: we don't recycle them today because we haven't prioritized doing so, not because it it technologically beyond our reach. In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient:

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/solarcycle-to-recycle-10-million-solar-panels-yearly

Trump shut that plant down, which means that other countries will get to recycle America's superannuated panels into modern, efficient ones and sell them back to America. America may have blocked any climate reparations for the poor world, but thanks to Comrade Trump, America's still going to end up paying them, in the form of windfall profits for countries whose cleantech economy is racing ahead of America's.

Unlike a fossil fuel economy, a cleantech sector does not require that your country have access to some difficult to find, unevenly distributed reservoir of old dead shit or even rare minerals. Not only is lithium far more common than once believed, it's also being phased out for use in batteries and replaced by sodium, the world's sixth-most abundant element:

https://cen.acs.org/energy/energy-storage-/Sodium-ion-batteries-Should-believe/103/web/2025/11

Lithium is set to join cobalt, a notorious conflict mineral, in the cleantech revolution's rear-view mirror as a transitional material used in early, primitive batteries and no longer required.

A post-carbon future is a post-petrostate future is a post-American future. It will run on solar and wind and batteries, which can be brought online cheaply and quickly, every time demand-destruction surges, using materials that are widely distributed around the world. It won't be a nuclear future, and not just because nuclear materials are (like oil) concentrated according to accidents of geography, nor merely because fissiles are geopolitically catastrophic (like oil). Nuclear plants take at least a decade to bring online, which means that they will always arrive ten years after some future Comrade Trump-type kicks off another orgy of demand destruction, and by the time we turn them on, the world will have already bought, improved and recycled two generations of batteries and panels.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/#hormuzed-into-the-gretacene

Image: Stefan Müller (climate stuff) (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greta_Thunberg_spricht_beim_Klimastreik_vor_dem_Reichstag_(51512266778).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Adding another insight from my dad who closely follows the energy industry: the oil companies aren't going to drill on conservation land that they're now technically allowed to because it takes years to get to the point where drilling actually starts, and none of them trust that they won't be kicked out or drowning in legal issues again as soon as we have a different president. So even if they had bank loans they aren't going to bite, because it's not a guaranteed long-term plan and drilling is expensive.

The momentum is against oil. It's just a matter of time.

[lesbianshepard]

Current twitter drama is Europeans confidently declaring that they don't need to drive or use overpriced public transport to get to the MetLife stadium for the World Cup; they will simply walk down the highway to get there. Girl it's New Jersey. They're gonna splatter you for fun.

[lesbianshepard]

If you manage to get on the turnpike before the cops stop you, a soccer mom is gonna do the Jersey slide in a RAV4 and turn your entire group into a wet speedbump

[bunjywunjy]

this? you want to walk down this????

please say sike

[bunjywunjy]

IT'S NOT A FUCKING STREET ITS AN 8-LANE SUPERHIGHWAY THAT GOES OVER A SWAMP

[hapalopus]

footpath

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

I appreciate your optimism but that's absolutely not a footpath. Highways here do not have those, and especially not I-95. That's a grass shoulder that's mowed because otherwise trees might drop branches onto the road. It is not continuous and will invariably turn into a ditch full of water, half a mile of brambles, a very steep hill tilting into or away from the road, or simply vanish when the road goes over a bridge. And those cars can easily be going over 130kph. There is a reason it's illegal to walk next to highways here.

America does not have footpaths. There isn't even a continuous sidewalk through most residential areas. And I-95 is equivalent to the Autobahn.

[respectissexy]

Things I find myself telling my teen patients often, in no particular order.

(I am not your therapist and nothing in this post is a substitute for getting your own personal mental health treatment if you need it.)

Being a teenager sucks. Your brain is in a state of development where all your emotions are intensified, and those emotions are frequently bad because being a teenager sucks. You’re basically an adult when it’s convenient for the adults, and a kid when it’s convenient for the adults. This is crazymaking. It is my opinion that critics of “it gets better” messaging do not recall being a teenager very well. I’m not saying being an adult is a picnic. But generally speaking it beats the hell out of being the legal property of your parents while your brain is going brrrrr.

On that note, if you have any kind of mental illness, these may be your worst, most symptomatic years. 

Your brain is also in a stage of development where new habits are more likely to stick. That means that if you and I (33) both started learning Russian tomorrow, you would be more likely to stick with it and get better at Russian faster than me; but if you and I started doing a new drug tomorrow, you would be more likely to get addicted.

It’s normal to hate living with your parents even if you love them. I’m not saying you have to love your parents, but if you do, that doesn’t obligate you to enjoy living under the same roof. MANY adults have loving relationships with parents they would never want to live with again. (It may also take a few years of living apart for you to determine whether you actually hate your parents or whether you just hate living with them. This too is normal.)

There’s nothing wrong with going through phases. If you believe that what you’ve got going on right now is going to be your permanent identity, well, you’d know better than anybody else; but it’s fine if it’s not. “I’m into this right now” is good enough and people should respect it.

How much time you spend on your Screen Device is less predictive of mental health outcomes than what you are actually doing on your Screen Device. Three hours of gaming with your friends beats one hour of watching thinspiration videos on TikTok or arguing with strangers on tumblr about who gets to call themselves a dyke. (Assuming your friends are nice to you.)

Sex is supposed to be fun. If you’re having sex and it isn’t fun, something is wrong – maybe you’re not ready to be having sex yet, maybe you’re having sex with the wrong people, maybe your partner needs to learn your body and preferences better, or maybe you’re having sex for the wrong reasons.

(Obligatory don’t do drugs BUT) if you’re going to do drugs, weed is safer than alcohol.

You may be tempted to assume that the people who treat you like you’re not cool enough to hang out with them are, in fact, the coolest people ever and ultimate arbiters of cool, and expend a lot of energy trying to win them over. I implore you to at least consider the possibility that your friends who actively want to hang out with you are exactly as cool as those people, and quite possibly cooler. 

If you barely eat anything all day and then binge at night, the reason you’re binging at night is because you barely ate all day. If you teach your body that it will not be fed for long periods of time, it will do its best to ensure, whenever you do eat, that you eat as much as possible. This is a feature, not a bug.

Sleep hygiene is unfortunately not bullshit.

“People experience social penalties for not being thin” is extremely true, but “no one will ever love you unless you’re thin” is extremely false.

The world is full of happy, successful, financially solvent adults who did not get into their first choice colleges.

[respectissexy]

One of the only good additions so far to the "don't do drugs but" bullet point.

I have also told kids "if you're thinking of doing random pills that someone brings to a party, you should look them up in the Drugs Identifier guide on Drugs.com and read about what you're taking before taking it". https://www.drugs.com/imprints.php?imprint=l&color=12&shape=24

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

9b. There is a 99% chance that anyone who acts like they're too cool for you, no matter how happy they act, is actually miserable and has terrible self-esteem. They are playing hard to get or rejecting you because it makes them feel better about themselves. Being friends with them will pressure you to be the same way.

14. Nutrition is unfortunately not bullshit. If you don't eat a balanced diet (including breakfast!) you will be kind of exhausted and hungry all the time.

15. Caffeine is a bandaid. If you are tired and you don't rest you will just get more and more tired until caffeine can't fix you any more and you get sick. If you use the caffeine bandaid for long enough the burnout/illness can be permanent.

16. Hydration is also not bullshit. It doesn't matter if you put juice or flavors in your water as long as you're drinking fluid. Also, regularly clean out your water bottle because mold can make you ridiculously sick.

[quick-nip]

(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) by Yao Xiao

words to remember

[ceylonsilvergirl]

THIS HAS MADE AN ACTUAL DIFFERENCE IN MY LIFE!!

Implementing this has improved how I feel about myself, and HOW I SEE OTHER PEOPLE!!

I’m not a burden to put up with. I’m a person who deserves respect, but does have some idiosyncrasies.

Other people aren’t barely tolerating me, they’re being patient and considerate and working hard to be polite.

And I find that when I acknowledge the good I see in other people, they feel respected and appreciated.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

To extrapolate a bit on that last point– constantly verbalizing your lack of self-esteem sabotages your relationships.

If you’ve just vented about your day to a friend and you say “sorry for bothering you”, your friend is going to hear “I don’t believe you care enough about how I feel” and “I want validation that you don’t hate me because you listening wasn’t good enough”. To someone who cares about you, that feels really shitty! You’re centering your negativity and haven’t actually acknowledged their care for you at all– you’ve essentially rejected them and implied they aren’t sincere in their friendship with you.

If, on the other hand, you say “thank you for listening”, your friend will hear “I know that was probably a lot but I’m grateful you’re here for me”. By expressing gratitude instead of fishing for validation for something they’ve already given you, you center your positive feelings toward them and express trust that they care about you.

For people who aren’t friends, saying “thank you” instead of “I’m sorry” expresses confidence. It signals to people that you’re self-assured about mistakes and flaws, and that you know how to advocate for yourself (and aren’t an easy target for emotional manipulation). Basically, it makes people trust you more! In workplace settings, this alone can genuinely be the difference in whether you get a raise or a promotion, and in social settings it makes you more likely to attract emotionally healthy people.

Chronic apologizing is a really hard habit to break, but unlearning it will genuinely improve every aspect of your life. You can do it!!

[03josten]

stop fucking using the word psychotic to describe bad behaviour and violence already god fucking damn it

[03josten]

oh my god i'm so tired psychotic does not mean violent it does not mean angry or erratic. it refers to a person suffering from psychosis, a loss of touch with reality that includes hallucinations and/or delusions. psychotic people are not inherently violent and y'all need to understand how much stigma you create when you again and again incorrectly use the word psychotic without even thinking about it

[03josten]

would appreciate if non-psychotic people could reblog this

[mortalityplays]

there is no single argument against including trans women in sports that doesn't boil down to "women aren't supposed to be good at this" and it's fucking insane to me that every woman in the world isn't up in arms about the way this issue has laid institutional misogyny bare to the bone

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

I gave basically this exact testimony in front of my state legislature last year over a set of trans sports ban bills (we won!), and was surprised to find that I was the only one who approached it from this angle– everyone else focused on the impact bans would have on trans people, which is frankly not convincing to anyone who's genuinely convinced they're "protecting" cis women. One of the legislators came up to me after to thank me for adding this perspective.

Arguing for trans people's humanity can work on people who are not super transphobic, but "trans sports bans are an insult to the skills of cis women" is a really good way to convince self-identified feminists to support trans women in sports. Nobody wants to be the person who votes for a bill that says cis women are weak.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[beese-churger]

Imagine if sometimes some fucking Ț̷̡͂̀̎͠h̸̜̅͐̄ì̸̩̮̃̃̆n̸̗̰̟͉͐̑͋͆͜g̸̮̻͔̼̬͌ could just crash through the shimmering veil of reality with a trail of fragments from the suffocating void enveloping it, grab whoever's unlucky enough to be closest, and swoop back out like it was nothing. And this was just one of your everyday hazards to worry about. Incredible cosmic horror concept

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Addendum: dippers do not eat fish! They're under there to find bugs, or sometimes mollusks

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

immediately and deeply obsessed with any mammal that adapts into the Sneefling Snorfer niche

Black and rufous sengi - Rhynchocyon petersi

Aardvark - Orycterops afer

Western long-beaked echidna - Zaglossus bruijnii

Star-nosed mole - Condylura cristata

Giant anteater - Myrmecophaga tridactyla

Russian desman - Desmana moschata

Short-beaked echidna - Tachyglossus aculeatus

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Don't forgot pangolins and tapirs!

(image source)

(image source)

[tira3sii]

Everybody should tell me their dumbest pet nickname progression. I would like to see it.

For me it's Matilda -> Tilly -> illy -> iller -> the iller -> the killer

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Billie -> Bill -> Billbill -> Billbin -> Billbin Baggirl -> BillBoblinMcBaggirl

Which has resulted in us also calling her "a whole bag of girl" because she feels like she's made of bricks despite being a completely average sized cat

[akindplace]

do you guys remember when we googled something and we would get results that were actually related to the things we searched

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Old, functional Google is still available here! No AI or sponsored results, and if you go through this webpage it won't track you.

A quick way to get an AI-free search without any extra work.

There are also browser extensions that will add the &udm=14 modifier to searchbar queries :)

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Nonbinary achievement: got called they, she, and he during a single dentist appointment in which I only spoke to 2 people

[tboy-cock]

the reason trans men are rarely named in anti trans bills is that the legislation to oppress trans men already typically existed and has been happening before now btw

[sugarcubii]

We are already banned from sports because of testosterone. We are already not safe in bathrooms, we are already on a list the moment we start hrt because of testosterone being a controlled substance, we have already been in danger but people don't care and we die quietly.

This is not to take anything away from trans women because they are absolutely also in danger it's just that we have already been effected by a lot of this new stuff , that doesn't mean trans women are not effected or they have it easy or whatever because that would be bs trans women are in danger it's just that we are in danger too and have already been in danger it's not easier for us either and people should care about us too, there is no shortage of care to be given, empathy and care isn't a finite resource. Every trans person deserves people fighting for their rights. Every trans person deserves rights. None of this should be happening or have been happening.

[spamtown-usa]

I agree with this post but can someone tell me what sources we’re using for trans men being banned from sports? It seems trans men must go through a process to be in sports because of the testosterone in many areas, but I am not sure I would call this banning unless we have evidence of people being denied a lot? There is also the waivers in the UK that are worded in a way pretty much no trans man would ever agree to, but this is also not an outright ban. The words we use matter and I fear if we simplify it so much that we’re effectively lying, we won’t get to people

Would just like to reiterate that I Agree down here

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Trans men aren't banned by name mainly because there's no need to add a "no trans men" rule when they're already banned by the "no testosterone doping" rule, and are likely to be dismissed as a joke if they try to apply for an exemption like cis men with low T can. Places where trans men can get the "no testosterone" rule waived are not common, and it still requires a ton of a paperwork, medical checkups, and possibly even a psych exam, all of which are likely to be hostile and have access barriers. It's a quieter and less direct form of exclusion for sure, but it has the same end result. It's the same general rule where trans women are treated as a sensationalized threat and trans men are treated like they don't actually exist.

[directactionforhope]

The fact that physical therapy is not a frontline treatment for chronic pain is a searing indictment of the global medical field.

[directactionforhope]

Seriously. If you have chronic pain, limits on how much you can walk/move, or both go see a physical therapist.

I have had physical therapy ELIMINATE the following medical and pain problems, solely or in large part:

Lower back pain so severe I could at first not even walk to the bathroom (sciatic)

Foot pain whenever I walked (plantar fasciitis)

Three years of a fucked up ankle that was at times seriously impacting me

Pain when typing (carpal tunnel), at least twice

Widespread nerve damage that caused massive chronic pain and left me housebound for two years

The physical pain/fatigue/other results caused by having to recover from that kind level of pain and inactivity (cough being housebound) for so long

I try not to talk too much about my health on here, for a variety of reasons, but I am being newly reminded of how much basically every single person with chronic pain should be referred to physical therapy imho

If literally nothing else, because being in that much pain for that long causes a lot of inflammation and makes your body get stuck bracing and moving in ways that ALSO cause chronic pain, so that has to be addressed too.

If you don't have access to physical therapy, there are some really good resources, exercises, and videos online that can at least get you started (but be cautious if you can't get assessed in person), but I'm not qualified to vet or recommend any of those.

But if any of this sounds like it might help you, and you can go to physical therapy, please go to physical therapy.

It has been life-changing for me and has (in conjunction with other things) given me huge portions of my quality of life back.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Also. If you're in physical therapy for over a month and the exercises they're giving you aren't helping, or if at any point a practitioner does not listen when you say doing something causes you too much pain, you can ask to see someone else at that practice or just straight up leave and go somewhere else. Like with everything, there are a lot of good physical therapists out there but also a lot of terrible ones.